The debate between Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati began with the identification of Bhagwati with growth and Sen with redistribution. Later, most converged to the view that both sides value both instruments but with different emphases. But this is obfuscation.

Taking his latest book An Uncertain Glory, coauthored with Jean Dreze at face value, I accept that Sen recognizes the importance of growth for poverty alleviation. He writes, "Economic growth is indeed important, not for itself, but for what it allows a country to do with the resources that are generated, expanding both individual incomes and the public revenue that can be used to meet social commitments." Rising incomes and revenues as a consequence of growth were the two themes that Bhagwati had expounded in his 12th Vikram Sarabhai Memorial Lecture delivered 26 years ago. Notwithstanding his claim to the contrary, in his latest book, Sen was far from assigning this role to growth in the fight against poverty.

Responding to us in a letter to The Economistmagazine, Sen wrote, "the importance of economic growth as a means — not an end — has been one of the themes even in my earliest writings (including Choice of Techniques' in 1960 and Growth Economics in 1970)." The two books mentioned, while on growth, had nothing to do with growth as a means to poverty reduction.

Economic Growth, which happens to be on my bookshelf, is simply a collection of essays on growth models by diverse authors with the word "poverty" entirely missing from its subject index. But if Sen today accepts the importance of growth, saying in his latest book that the 3.5% growth during the first three decades following the independence was "painfully slow for the purpose of rapid development and poverty reduction," his prescriptions for sustained rapid growth fall short of what we advocate in our book.

His prescriptions are limited to cutting regressive subsidies and hiking spending on health and education. At least one media commentator has written that Sen now supports labour-law reform. But beyond the sentence "India's labour regulations have been counter-productive" in an interview with the same commentator, there is little else to back up this claim. And one-sentence criticism, thrown in during an interview, does not amount to support for reform.

Of the 52 central government acts on labour, which ones would he put on the anvil and what would be the precise nature of his reforms? Without such elaboration, I cannot take seriously suggestions that Sen now supports labour-market reforms. Unlike us, he has written nothing supporting further liberalisation of trade and investment to accelerate and sustain growth. Nor has he supported the opening of multi-brand retail.

On state interventions aimed at combating malnutrition, illiteracy and ill health, differences are much deeper. Sen strongly favors delivery by the state: food through the public distribution system, education through government run schools and health through government run health care centers. A commentator notes that he is now for cash transfers but this is contradicted by everything else he has written and said. Sen calls for a more activist state but offers no operationally workable set of instructions that can cut the vast inefficiencies, corruption and leakage in the public provision of food, education and health. Nor does he have a plan to raise the quality of government-provided food, education and health to acceptable levels.

Today, even low-income households avoid ration shops in favor of open market purchases of grain, do multiple jobs to be able to afford tiffin for their children in preference to government provided midday meals and opt for private, even if unrecognized, schools and private healthcare. We advocate empowering households with the decision-making authority through cash transfers, education vouchers and health insurance. They should decide from whom they want to buy food, education and health. The government providers should recoup their costs by competing for households against their private counterparts. Recognition of these differences is the first step toward better policy making.